SCCM – Controlling Application Supersedence

You might be wondering how to control this box in your SCCM 2012 R2 SP1 (or ConfigMgr SP2, pretty much the same thing) deployments.

I’ve finally been able (with the help of my friend and future ConfigMgr MVP nominee, Eric Anderson) to track down precisely what is going on in the confusing world of applications and supersedence in SCCM.

The Scenario

· Machines all had the old version of Java, Java 8 Update 65, which is deployed via either a Task Sequence , or with a firm-wide mandatory advertisement
· We made a new deployment of Java, Update 71, and set this to supersede the old version
· The new version of Java was deployed as Available yesterday, not required, to a small subset of machine (5 or so)
· Today, these machines have all automatically updated to the newest version of Java even though it was an Available deployment!!